Harder (Caroline & West #2)(79)
He looks at me for a minute. Makes this hmph kind of noise. “That’s the first intelligent thing I’ve heard you say.”
Caroline reaches across me and punches him in the shoulder, hard.
“Hey,” he says. But it’s mild, and he’s looking at her with affection as he rubs his arm and asks, “What about what I want?”
“You’re not the one who has to sleep in the bed,” she says.
“I’m not talking about beds anymore.”
“Fine, then let’s talk about what you’re really talking about—you’re not the one who has to live with it, Dad. I am. So I’m going to make the decisions, and you get to decide whether you support them or don’t, but that’s the extent of it.”
“When you’re making decisions with my money, going to school on my dime, it’s not the extent of it. I get a say. You owe me a real conversation, not just this garbage about I support it or not but that’s all. I’m already living with it. I didn’t get a choice on that, but we’ve got a choice on this lawsuit.”
“You don’t have to live with it the way I do,” Caroline says. “You’re not getting deposed. You’re not taking calls from the state senate and telling them, Yeah, you’re right, I could help you, but I won’t, because I’ve got this vendetta I’m in the middle of, so no.”
“We talked about this. We knew it was going to be hard, that’s just the way these things go. It’s normal to get discouraged at this point in the proceedings, but when you start something, you see it through—that’s what I taught you.”
“I’m not quitting, Dad.”
“What you do is you put your finger on what you want, and then you go after it. If you think you can just give up at the first sign of trouble—”
“I’m not giving up!”
If I were her dad, I’d back the f*ck off, but I guess the two of them are too much alike, because he sounds just as pissed when he replies, “What do you call it, then? Halfway to trial, and you’re going to walk away? We could nail this kid, Caroline! We get a judgment against him, that gives us a lien on his future salary. We’ll make it so he can’t take a step for the rest of his life without this breathing down his neck. Make him pay.”
I’ve been washing the same plate for a solid minute. The water is running, steam rising off it, and you could cut the tension with a knife.
Caroline cuts it with one question. “What if I don’t want him to pay?”
Her dad sets down the plate he was drying and leans his hip into the counter. I might as well be invisible, standing here between them. “Why wouldn’t you want that?”
“Because there isn’t any justice in it,” she says. “It’s not a scale I can balance. He puts my naked body online, sends his dogs after me, makes my life scary—”
“Makes your life hell,” her father says.
“—and I decide, Hey, then I’m going to do it back to him? That’s your solution? That’s not justice. It’s vengeance, and it’s petty.”
“You don’t understand how the system works.”
“I do understand,” she says. “You raised me to understand. And what I’m telling you is, the system is broken on this. I don’t need Nate’s money for the rest of his life, I need for what Nate did to me to not be allowed anymore. I want that law on the books. I want a bunch of changes to the laws so that *s can’t post photos without consent and websites can’t hide behind the Copyright Act with impunity. I want people’s attitudes to change so I don’t get called a slut just because I had sex with my boyfriend and he took some pictures. I want to help make sure nobody else goes through what I did—that Frankie and girls like Frankie won’t ever have to endure that—and what we’re doing, throwing money into a pit with this civil suit, hiding behind Jane Doe—that’s not going to change a thing. So don’t talk to me about justice unless you really want to talk to me about justice, because there are nonprofits you could give the money we’re paying the lawyer that would use it to bring about a lot more justice than this lawsuit that you seem to think I need your permission to walk away from.”
When she’s finished, the whole house is quiet.
The whole world feels quiet, with Caroline’s words just echoing around.
This is what it sounds like, I think, to know exactly what you want.
This is what it sounds like to thrive.
I’ve heard her before like this. Every time, it wrecks me, because I’m so f*cking proud of her.
Her dad doesn’t say anything. I watch him, looking for some sign that he’s got pride in her, too.
What he does surprises me: he sits down at the kitchen table and thinks. You can tell he’s thinking because he looks so much like Caroline, his forehead furrowed and his eyes gone far away.
Coffee burbles and drips into the pot. Caroline picks up the dish towel and angrily dries what’s left of the dishes in the sink. At a loss, I start washing again. We finish up. Caroline puts the dishes away.
I lean back against the sink with my arms crossed, trying to understand what this even is.
Where I’m from, men are only good for two things. We learn how to fight, and we learn how to f*ck. There isn’t anything much else for us—no jobs you can raise a family on, no other ways to live unless you go looking for them, and even then there’s no guarantee you’re going to find something better.